In one of his stories, Borges says that mathematics originated in stones; Hence the word calculus comes from the Latin, calculus (small stone), diminutive of calx, which leads us to the Greek word khalix, meaning gravel, pebbles or limestone.
From these details, where etymology plays with literature, we know that stones hide much more than they reveal. What is happening is that we are not aware of it. Its seemingly timeless mysteries take us to Romania, to a small town called Costesti, where the stones have a life of their own and are called Trovants, whose name means “growing stones” in Romanian. About 6 million years ago these stones were small pebbles, calculus, which over time have evolved into stones covered with blunt-like bumps.
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Trovant grow with the rain, absorbing minerals from the water and mixing them with the sandstone that surrounds their hard rock core. It is curious to see how these life-forms lead us from the mineral kingdom to Newton when, in a 1675 letter to the President of the Royal Society, he divined the play of nature. In the above letter, Newton defends his hypothesis about the properties of light. In doing so, he speaks of an ethereal medium that is elastic and serves as a conductor of matter, and comes to believe that all things originate in the above substance when he came in contact with the force of nature.
The “Trovants” are rocks that grow with the rain, absorbing minerals from the water and mixing them with sandstone; For Newton, nature is a perpetual force that “makes liquids from solids, and solids from liquids.”
As Newton noted in his letter, nature is a perpetual force that “makes liquids from solids, and solids from liquids,” in the same way that it makes solids from volatiles, and vice versa. When we see the images of the trovants we realize that what Newton wrote does not remain a simple guess and that nature not only lies hidden in the details but also underlies all forms of matter. For this reason, finding the passivity of stones means turning away from the material of which life is made. That’s like speaking of the stuff literature is made of when one of Borges’ characters discovers little blue rocks they don’t want to be counted.
In the Buzăului Mountains in Romania you can observe the “Trovants”.Nicubunu (Wikimedia Commons)
Sometimes in Borges’ story, some stones disappear, only to reappear later. There comes a time when the protagonist goes insane and begs the heavens for a way to get rid of the blue bricks for reasons that “destroy mathematical science”.
It’s when a pale-skinned, gray-bearded beggar comes to his aid, trading the stones for something as dreadful as days and nights, customs, sanity, and the cosmic vertigo that orders the universe and, to this day, creates some disturbing stones , which are created by rainwater over time, grow and expand. For the trovants appear before our eyes as if they were the origin of all living beings.
Note: The story mentioned in this article is entitled Blue Tigers and is included in the volume Complete Stories by Jorge Luis Borges (Lumen).
the stone axe It is a passage in which Montero Glez, with his desire for prose, exerts his particular attack on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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